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Movies and television shows are full of blunders, some more noticeable than others, and each with their specific guild of victims. Ornithologists fume when British period dramas are overdubbed with American birdsongs. Government employees will tell you that the supposed main White House staffer in Contact has a nonexistent job. Archeologists hate movie shipwrecks, and marine biologists are already mad about the zombie sharks in the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, which, as cartilaginous fishes, should not have ribs—even ghostly ones.
But these are merely occasional grievances. There's one group of experts who can barely flip on the television without being exposed to egregious, head-on-desk mistakes: chess players.
"There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film," says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from "20 percent" to "much more often than not," all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don't have to be. "There are so many [errors], it's hard to keep track," says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. "And there are constantly [new ones] coming out."
[...] Peter Doggers of Chess.com notes another Dramatic Checkmate move: the felled king. "Tipping over your king as a way of resigning the game is only done in movies," he says. (See Mr. Holland's Opus, in which Jay Thomas slaps his king down after being owned by Richard Dreyfuss).A normal chess player will just go in for a good-game-style handshake. "This falling king thing has somehow become a strong image in cinematography," he says, "But chess players always think: 'Oh no, there we go again...'"
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2, Funny) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday March 23 2017, @12:25AM (11 children)
Never understood why it was even possible for consoles to explode in Star Trek.
In addition to seat-belts, the also lost fuse technology, apparently.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @12:31AM (2 children)
The fuse became lost technology during World War 3.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @10:21AM (1 child)
Well, not exactly lost, but the fuses became that expensive that they figured it would be cheaper if they just replaced the screen. ;-)
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday March 23 2017, @06:30PM
This one actually makes sense - if your ship has replicators and a hefty excess of energy available it would be faster and easier to just rip the panel out and pop in a new one rather than locating and finding the fuse.
Similar stuff actually often is done at high-reliability installations - keep a backup unit of anything likely to break and when it breaks replace with the backup, order a new backup, and ship off the broken unit for repair.
But yeah - in the real world they keep an extra fuse/breaker to avoid the star-trekky.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:11PM (6 children)
It's not just fuse technology, it's bizarre electrical design. Why would you route so much power through a bridge console? These are control devices; they only need a minimal amount of power for lighting up and displaying information on the screens. The high-power stuff is located elsewhere on the ship, and can be controlled through these devices with network connections, probably over fiber-optics.
Honestly, as an EE, the exploding consoles (which even kill people sometimes) is easily the most disappointing thing about Star Trek to me. It just makes no sense at all, and was clearly put there for drama only. There's plenty of other ways for crewmembers to get injured or killed, especially during a battle (perhaps the inertial dampers failed or had a brownout during a torpedo hit); there's no reason to resort to a plot device that anyone with a basic understanding of electricity, and who knows what a "relay" is, would immediately see is BS.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:45PM (2 children)
But they *do* have an answer for that. "an overload". You see, the consoles are not designed to route that much power.
Or are us saying any overload should only blow the relays that will obviously be needed?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 23 2017, @04:13PM (1 child)
Yes, an overload should only blow out relays. There shouldn't even be any power connections to the consoles capable of routing anywhere near that much power. Fiber-optic cabling can't route any power at all, at least not electrical power, only a tiny amount of light used for signaling. Even if you designed a ship like that with modern electronics technology, and for cheapness's sake used Ethernet cable instead of fiber, 30 gauge Ethernet wire isn't going to route any power at all; the wire would simply vaporize somewhere, probably close to the overload spot. The wire itself would act as a fuse. Modern cars even do this, and have for a long time; instead of using fuses in some places, they use "fusable links", which is nothing more than a short section of wire of small diameter which will burn up and fail first.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday March 23 2017, @06:39PM
Well, some PHB might have overheard that "standardizing makes everything simpler" and later asked if the panel's power-req could be routed via the turbolift power system cables... or maybe they decided on using phaser-grade electrical system.
I mean, we are talking about a universe where most stuff is virtually free and superconductors are readily available - the potential for PHBs to run amok with no budgetrestrictions are scary.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:53PM (2 children)
perhaps the inertial dampers failed or had a brownout during a torpedo hit
It would be rather amusing to have one of the bridge crew fail to shout out "captain, the inertial dampers have failed!" fast enough during battle, captain orders a maneuver, and immediately the entire crew is smeared across the nearest wall.
Next episode: "Captain Drake taking over, here. After replacing the crew, I am inspecting my new command..."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 23 2017, @04:08PM
Yeah, the inertial dampers can't fail that badly or else all the humans will be dead, and probably the ship will be crushed too. Even in ST:TNG, they had the concept of the "structural integrity field", which you can read about in the Technical Manual, and actually has to be running any time the ship is moving. They realized that with the g-forces in the maneuvers the ship was supposedly doing, that anything remotely like normal materials we have now would not be able to maintain structural integrity, so they invented the SIF to make it work. So when you see the crew being thrown around, the inertial dampers and SIF haven't actually *failed* outright, they're just not operating at 100%, so you could call it a "brown-out".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @08:31PM
How come the anti-gravity control never gets knocked out?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday March 23 2017, @09:03PM
Never understood why it was even possible for consoles to explode in Star Trek.
'Cause the Heisenberg Compensators failed to reverse the polarity of the dilitium crystals, DUH!!